ntroducing. . . 



By 



Helen 
Topping 







•Meet the Soul of Kagawa!^- 

hphe eyes of all American Christendom are focused on this little man 
from the Orient. He comes preaching a new way of life, a new social order, 
a more profound conception of Christ’s teachings. To understand his 
message one must first understand the sensitive soul of the man. 

Kagawa himself reveals his own heart and soul in 

SONGS FROM THE SLUMS 

a new book which is setting the religious world agog. 

Readers opinions: 

“Kagawa has revealed his own soul, his deepest inspiration, his fullest consecration, his 
source of spiritual power nowhere quite so fully and truly as in SONGS FROM THE SLUMS.’* 
— W. O. Carver. 

“I feel that I have met Kagawa personally, for in this book he revealed his soul to me!”— 
Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon. 

“Anyone is poor who has not met Kagawa in SONGS FROM THE SLUMS.”— Bishop 
Edwin H. Hughes. 

“I have never read anything equal to it!”— G. Baez Camargo. 

“It is terrific, gruelling, grinding—enough to shake the soul awake.”— Wm. L. Stidger. 

“To know Kagawa’s spirit and power one must read SONGS FROM THE SLUMS.”— 
J. Richard Spann. 

“A poignant, piercing cry of a sensitive soul.”— Bishop Paul B. Kern. 

“SONGS FROM THE SLUMS reveals more of the real Kagawa than any biography could.” 
—Miss Ina Corrine Brown. 

“For the first time I know the man as a real man.”— I. J. Van Ness. 

“I found myself paralleling many of its pictures with scenes from the life of Jesus.”— TV. A. 
Smart. 

“In SONGS FROM THE SLUMS we best see the mystical Christianity, the deep-rooted 
human sympathy and noble aspirations of one of Christianity’s greatest souls.”— Charles 
T. Lor am. 

“I felt as if Jesus once again was moving among earth’s lowly and forgotten souls.”— J. R. 
Thomas. 

“Breathes the spirit of faith in God blossoming where man has done his worst.”— Wynn C. 
Fairfield. 

“I have not read anything which for sheer spiritual translucence equals this.”— Leslie B. Moss. 
“Will take a front rank place in the literature of the Christian religion.”— R. E. Dififendorfer. 
“Makes your heart bleed as it stirs you.”—S. Guy Inman. 

“SONGS FROM THE SLUMS helps us to look at our own world through the eyes of Jesus. 
A book to stir one’s heart.”— W. E. J. Gratz. 

“One hears and feels the heart-beat of the St. Francis of Japan. SONGS FROM THE SLUMS 
reveals the depths of Kagawa’s soul more adequately than do his meditations or his biogra¬ 
phies.”— Miss Wilmina Rowland. 

“If you want stark realism to stab your social conscience awake; if you want the record of a 
sensitive spirit reacting to the tragedy of life; if you like sharp, vivid word pictures; if you 
want to catch the passion of one of the greatest Christians of our time—For all these things 
and more you will value SONGS FROM THE SLUMS by Toyohiko Kagawa.” —John C. 
Irwin. 

• Introduction and biographical sketch 
by Dr. Sherwood Eddy 

51 Illustrations AT YOUR OWN BOOK STORE Price, $1.00 


s 


©Cl A 95897 






Introducing Kagawa 

By Helen Topping 

i 

Kagawa was an orphan at four. His father and his mother 
both were dead, and the father’s legal wife was bringing him 
up, and hating him. Over and over again, while she cared for 
him, she would say, “You are the son of my enemy.” The 
grandmother for a while beat him every day, and the other 
children took their cue from the grownups. When a little girl 
in the neighborhood got hurt and nobody knew how or why 
it had happened, it was blamed on him as a matter of course. 
He didn’t eat for two whole days, and then gathered up his 
pennies and took them to the parents of the little girl in an 
effort to make amends for a thing he had never done. He said 
he did not want to live there any more. 

His home was in the open country. His guardians showed 
mercy and let him go into the near-by small city to live in 
the home of his uncle, where his older brother had preceded 
him. Here he continued attending school, and at eleven was 
sent also to a Buddhist temple. The Buddhist priests taught 
him Confucian precepts. “Be a saint. Be a gentleman,” they 
said. Kagawa wanted to be a saint and a gentleman with all 
the fervor of his childish heart, but he was afraid he never 
could attain to that status, not only because they had given 
him that impression, but also because there was no saint and no 
gentleman anywhere near for him to imitate—not among the 
Buddhist priests and certainly not among the members of his 
own household. 

At fourteen he was thinking, way beyond his years, about 
the tragic state of the whole world as he had found it, long¬ 
ing to do something about it, yet fearful he never could. He 
feared he was caught in a vicious circle that he could not break. 
Then a missionary invited him into an English Bible class. 
Kagawa asked his oldest brother’s permission for his brother 
was his legal guardian. The brother said: “Christianity is a 
traitor’s religion. You are never allowed to become a Christian 
in this country. But English is necessary for an educated man, 
so you may join the class, especially since it’s an unusual oppor- 

- 3 - 


tunity to learn to speak it with the foreigner’s own pronuncia¬ 
tion.” 

Kagawa joined the class. Then the character of Christ, of 
whom he had never heard before, began to unfold before him 
as the saint and the gentleman he had been looking for. Just 
at that time his brother died. He looked back on his brother’s 
life with the more profound sadness because it had been char¬ 
acterized by nothing except the wrong sort of behavior. He 
contrasted this with the life of Christ, and began to do his own 
thinking. 

The missionary went off on a summer vacation, and gave the 
boys a number of Bible verses to memorize. I doubt if any of 
the others in the class learned them, because it is so difficult 
to memorize in a language entirely different from one’s own, 
but Kagawa was desperately in earnest, and he got those verses. 
He tells us what they were—Luke 12:27-31. Memorizing does 
something to you, and Kagawa says: “I discovered my Father 
in heaven, and in me.” He began to turn all his terrific anxiety 
about the state of the world, and his own possible future rela¬ 
tionship to it, into prayer. 

For seven months he prayed to be made like Christ. In Ja¬ 
pan we don’t have tables and chairs and bedsteads. You take 
off your shoes when you go into the house, and sit on the floor, 
eat on the floor, and sleep on the floor. All that Kagawa had 
when he started to go to bed at night was a couple of thick 
comforters—half way between comforter and mattress. He 
would pull them out of the cupboard and spread one below and 
one above and wriggle himself in between, and there for seven 
months, in that very anti-Christian household, he was praying 
to be made like Christ. 

After seven months came the turn of the year, the first of 
January, when every Japanese child becomes a year older. 
Kagawa was now fifteen. He went back to the mission to bor¬ 
row another book. He was reading Kant’s “Critique of Pure 
Reason” in a foreign language. The missionary stopped him, 
asking, “Kagawa, don’t you believe in God by this time?” 

“Yes,” he said. 

“And how about prayer ? Do you pray ?” 

“Oh, yes.” 

“But where?” 

Kagawa was just the ordinary fifteen-year-old boy. He got 
red in the face and could not answer, because he thought it 
was probably very impolite to God to pray in bed, and the 
Japanese are great sticklers regarding etiquette. But the mis- 

- 4 - 

JUN 24 1936 * 


sionary understood that he was praying, and said: “Isn’t it 
time for you to be baptized, by now ?” 

“Oh, if I were baptized, the family would put me out of 
the house and I couldn’t go to school any more.” 

“Isn’t that a timid view to take of the case ?” 

“Are you calling me a coward ? All right, I want to be bap¬ 
tized.” 

It was true that he wanted to be baptized, but also no Japa¬ 
nese boy will ever let you call him a coward! So in two weeks’ 
time he was in church and teaching a Sunday school class. 

II 

Kagawa graduated from high school with flying colors, and 
his uncle said: “You have learned a great deal of extra Eng¬ 
lish. I will send you to the Imperial University and you can 
be a foreign diplomat.” Kagawa thanked him profusely, but 
said: “You know, what I have got to do is to go to theological 
seminary and be a preacher.” That let the cat out of the bag 
(about his being a Christian), and he was put out of the house, 
disinherited. But the missionary got him a scholarship, and 
he went through junior college, three years in two. 

At nineteen, as he was on his way to the theological semi¬ 
nary, spending his summer vacation preaching forty days in 
the open air at a city about half way along his route, he al¬ 
most collapsed with tubercular pneumonia. The doctor came 
belatedly, and said: “There’s no hope for this boy. He won’t 
live.” Then Kagawa began to pray harder than he ever had 
prayed before in his life. He prayed for hours and fasted for 
two meals of the day, just for the gift of life. 

It is necessary to pause here in the story to try to under¬ 
stand just what was going on in his mind. According to one 
definition of religion, he might have been expected to accept 
that doctor’s verdict—at least with resignation, for by dying 
he would pass to the safety of heaven, instead of being left 
to face the most clouded sort of future, a disinherited orphan. 
But Kagawa believed that he must go ahead and live so as to 
make is possible for a great many other people to become Chris¬ 
tians, and it was very clear that there were two parts to that 
job. One was to preach the gospel, and the other was to abolish 
poverty. 

You should know that Kagawa’s father had come from a very 
rich family which for generations had had charge of nine¬ 
teen population areas, of 5,000 each, called villages in Ja¬ 
pan. He also had been secretary to the Privy Council of the 


- 5 - 


Emperor at one time and had helped start the two big ship¬ 
ping companies that are still sending Japanese boats around 
the world today. On the other hand, Kagawa’s mother had 
come from a home down in the slums so poor that they had sold 
the daughter to provide the rice for the remainder of the fam¬ 
ily. Kagawa knew that she had obeyed the highest thing she 
had ever been taught, filial piety, in submitting to this hideous 
plan, and that she had loved him with a genuine mother’s love. 
He also knew that even then, two decades later, many Japa¬ 
nese girls were still being taught that sort of sacrifice to lighten 
the poverty of their families, and he figured out that back of 
the sort of life which had caused the agony of his boyhood was 
the economic problem, and the economic inequality between his 
father and mother. He thought he must abolish that economic 
inequality in order to make the world a real family; so he was 
praying for the gift of life to go on and work for a great many 
years to do this. 

He had been praying for six hours when the afternoon sun 
came round the corner; it struck the polished wooden pillar of 
the alcove of honor which is the focus of attention in the Japa¬ 
nese room. Along with the sunshine Kagawa’s soul was flooded 
with the love of God, and he knew his prayer was answered. 
His fever actually began to go down, and the next day the 
doctor could hardly recognize him as the same patient. In a 
few days Kagawa was able to return to the reading of the 
Psalms. 

Ill 

Then came convalescence and his return to school, and we 
find him two years later—to be exact, on Christmas eve in 
1909—actually beginning to carry out his plan. The other 
schoolboys had gone home for vacation, and he was left alone 
in the big airy school dormitory on the hill. He was packing up 
his belongings and putting them on a small wooden cart and 
placing himself between the shafts. While he dragged it down 
through the streets, he passed an occasional church where they 
were already singing “Joy to the World,” and celebrating 
Christmas. He was singing it in his heart, too, because this was 
his long cherished fulfilment. 

When he got down to the slums he began to move into his 
house, which was just six feet square, inside measurement, 
and one of eighty-six of the same size and build. Kagawa 
thought himself very fortunate to get one of them, because 
there was always a waiting list of down-and-outs who needed 


- 6 - 


to rent a place for little or nothing. The only reason he could 
get this one was that a murder had been committed in it. It 
was supposed to be haunted by a ghost, and therefore no one 
else dared live in it. He went to the house owner and per¬ 
suaded him that he thoroughly enjoyed ghosts and so got the 
house. He had hardly begun to settle his belongings in it be¬ 
fore the king of the gamblers arrived, saying: “Kagawa, don’t 
you want a disciple?” 

“How ? What kind of disciple do you mean ?” 

“Oh, give him rice,” said the king of the gamblers, indicat¬ 
ing a forlorn figure who hovered behind him. 

He explained that this man had been a manual worker and 
worked for his rice. But now he had heart trouble. When the 
other laborers got up in the early morning and went off to their 
work, he got up at the same time and stood outside the house. 
He had stood thus so many days that the neighbors all called him 
Mr. Statue, and this nickname was really all he had left in the 
world. Kagawa took him in, shared his rice and his bed with 
him, and they spent their Christmas day together. 

Then in a few days two other men, equally destitute, joined 
the family, and Kagawa had four mouths to feed with the rice 
that was meant for one theological student, and not a grain 
to spare. He had just eleven yen a month, which at that time 
was something like $11 in purchasing power. He took to clean¬ 
ing chimneys for the faculty and so earned five yen more, but 
the combined sum was not nearly enough to feed four men. 
They held a family council, and Mr. Statue, who had been 
the first to arrive, took responsibility. He had had lots of ex¬ 
perience in getting along on little or nothing, and he suggested : 
“If we put ten times as much water in our rice when we cook 
it, it will make soup, and that will go farther.” They thought 
that a fine idea, and began to eat rice soup. 

But then the four realized that there would be a number 
of days at the end of the month when they would not have 
even soup, so they had to have another family council, and 
Mr. Statue made another suggestion. He said, “Let’s eat two 
meals a day instead of three.” So they actually lived on two 
meals of rice soup a day for fifty days, and Mr. Statue ex¬ 
plained to the others that under this regime it is good etiquette 
to lie down, and that if you did so and kept very still you 
wouldn’t feel the pangs of hunger quite so badly. But of course 
Kagawa could not lie down. He had to dash up the hill to the 
theological seminary every morning and do his studying and 
then tramp all about the slums on his social service. There were 


- 7 - 


plenty of emergencies in those early days, and I am sure he be¬ 
came acutely conscious of his stomach. 

But there was one other thing that he was even more con¬ 
scious of, and that was that God was his Father. During those 
early days he was working out his philosophy of democracy 
and he based it on two major facts. First, the universal father¬ 
hood of God—God loves every human being as much as he 
loves you and me. You know the hymn which says, “Count your 
blessings, name them one by one/’ If you do that you can get 
some degree of understanding of how much God loves you. 
Then you can begin to appreciate how much he loves every 
other human being, and one thing that helps to do that is to 
sense this other fact upon which Kagawa based his belief in 
democracy—that every human being has one stomach, not two 
stomachs, nor four as a cow has. And there are no millionaires 
in stomachs, but every human being has one stomach, and it 
is meant to be reasonably filled. It’s almost as bad to have it 
too full as to have it too empty. You know, when a baby is born 
its first little cry is a demand to have its stomach filled, and it 
begins to consume. All babies, and all human beings, are con¬ 
sumers, while only about a quarter of the total number who 
achieve maturity become producers. But we are all, 100 per 
cent of us, consumers. This is a basic recognition in democracy. 

After fifty days of living on two meals a day of rice soup, this 
large family living in a small house was discovered by a Chris¬ 
tian nurse in the neighborhood. She gave Kagawa five yen, and 
he brought it home and they had a big meal of plenty of well 
cooked rice. The Japanese don’t like the mushy way we cook 
our rice. They put in enough water to a drop so that when the 
rice is done it puffs up like a mountain on top, and every grain 
is separate from every other grain, nice and chewy. They had 
plenty of rice cooked like this, and fish and vegetables. As part 
of the blessing Kagawa said, “Give us this day our daily bread,” 
and he said those words meant so much more to him than they 
ever had before that he felt he was saying them for the first 
time in his life. 

Other people besides the nurse learned of what was going on 
and began to help a little, and Kagawa had money in the house 
to buy rice and to help the very destitute. He said, however, 
that at first he had more trouble than he had had before, for 
the drunkards discovered it and came and demanded money 
for drink. You cannot lock a house that is six feet square, made 
mostly of paper sliding doors, and Kagawa was put to it to 
keep this money from them, for they would come with drawn 


- 8 - 


swords and loaded pistols, whereas he believed in absolute non- 
resistance and non-violence. (He has said that if he had once 
departed from that rule, he could not have lived a day in the 
slums.) Once a drunkard came and with his naked fist punched 
out Kagawa’s front teeth. When Kagawa comes to America 
if you hear him speak you may notice that his enunciation is not 
what it might be, and that there are four very prominent gold 
teeth in the front of his mouth, put in evidently by a middling 
sort of dentist. 

“It was dangerous, but I enjoyed it,” is Kagawa’s only com¬ 
ment upon this first period of his life in the slums. 

He had confined himself to philanthropy while building up 
his church. He came to the end of this first four years and eight 
months saying, “One individual working for individuals cannot 
change society.” He was out to abolish poverty, and he saw 
he couldn’t do it that way. For every man he could rehabilitate 
and get out of the slums, a dozen more would drift down in 
—bankrupt farmers driven off the farms, and broken down 
laborers driven out of the factories and away from other jobs. 
It was a steady, sluggish stream. “You have to stop it higher 
up,” said Kagawa. By that he meant that you have to get back 
to the essentials of the farm problem and the labor problem. 
So what did he do ? 

First, he wisely pulled up stakes and went off on his first 
trip to America and won his Bachelor of Divinity degree at 
Princeton Theological Seminary in a couple of years. He had 
studied theology in the seminary in Kobe, so the Dean at Prince¬ 
ton let him take chiefly mathematics and science in the uni¬ 
versity. Meanwhile Mrs. Kagawa, who had joined him after 
the first two years in the slums, went to Yokohama and took 
special Bible training. 

IV 

They came back to Kobe together after two years, and Kag¬ 
awa began the new stage in his work. He started to organize 
his people to help themselves. He did not try to organize the 
down-and-outs in the slums, for they were too “shot to pieces” 
already. It was their next door neighbors, their brothers and 
sisters and sons and daughters, in many cases—the industrial 
laborers—with whom he began. They could most directly help 
the slum people—in fact, they could do more than he as an 
upper class person could do. So he started the first labor school, 
the first labor newspaper, and then the Japanese Federation of 
Labor. He wrote a book called “The Adoration of the La- 


- 9 - 


borer,” in which he made the remark which is axiomatic to us 
in America—that the laborer produces the things which the rest 
of society needs; therefore his status in society is more essential 
to it than that of the king. 

This was a new idea to the Japanese at that time, and they 
said, “You are against the Emperor.” 

“Oh, no,” he said—and indeed he has always been very pa¬ 
triotic, very loyal. 

But they fined him 100 yen for writing that book and sup¬ 
pressed its publication. He says that if he had not paid that fine, 
the New Testament would have had to pay it, for every word he 
had in it he had taken out of the New Testament in one way 
or another. 

Kagawa obtained great gains for the laborers. In 1919 came 
the rice riots, all over Japan, but centering in Kobe where the 
offending Susuki Company had cornered the rice and sold it off 
to France at a high figure. The price of rice soared from 14 
sen a measure in January to 62 l / 2 sen on August 12. The poor 
people simply could not buy, and for the first time in Japan’s 
history there was general rioting among them. But in Kagawa’s 
slum districts in Kobe the police stood by with folded arms to 
keep the peace, while the people merely took their measure of 
rice, the amount one family would need for one day, and did 
not pay for it. The rice dealers made no protest. 

In other parts of Kobe, however, there was some violence, 
and the Governor sat up all night in his office to receive the re¬ 
ports of the rioting. The Mayor rushed in crying, “Call out the 
troops!” The Governor replied: “These people are not against 
the government. Didn’t you hear them cheer just now as they 
passed the government building? If I should call out the troops, 
they might make a mistake and kill one of the children of the 
Emperor.” And he refused to do so, saying that these people 
were settling the issue with the capitalists in their own way, 
and it was better to allow them to finish the job. 

This Governor worked very closely with Kagawa, behind the 
scenes. He had become a convert to Kagawa’s principles, for 
Kagawa had now been in the slums of Kobe for a full decade. 
All over Japan the leading men in government and business 
circles suddenly experienced a change of heart because of the 
rice riots, and established social welfare bureaus in all the city 
and provincial governments, while Kagawa was permitted to 
ignore the police regulation against labor organization, and to 
turn the Labor Benefit Society already existing into a real Labor 
Federation. 


- 10 - 


This was very encouraging. But two years later the laborers 
went a bit beyond bounds. Communistic influence was begin¬ 
ning to come in from Russia, and against Kagawa’s advice one 
of their leaders declared a general strike in the shipyards of 
Kobe and Osaka. There came a moment when 35,000 of them 
were marching around the bend of the hill and turning down¬ 
ward toward the gate of the biggest shipyard, aiming at destroy¬ 
ing the machinery. Kagawa was facing up toward them, stand¬ 
ing on the little bridge over which they must cross before reach¬ 
ing the shipyard gate. Again he was praying, with all his might, 
that they might not resort to this particular outburst of violence. 
Such was his influence over them by this time that he did not 
need to say a word, nor did they say much to each other. To 
tell the truth, they had not expected to find him there, for it 
was Sunday morning, and they thought he would be in church 
preaching. As each phalanx came around the corner and dis¬ 
covered him way down there below in front of them, all they 
did was to nudge each other. 

“There’s Kagawa,” they said. 

“Kagawa?” 

“Yes, Kagawa”—and they were suddenly inspired with an¬ 
other idea as to how to celebrate that particular day, and went 
off and carried it out peacefully. Kagawa’s prayer was an¬ 
swered again. 

This strike failed, and the leaders, more than a hundred of 
them, were all put into prison, including Kagawa. It was mid¬ 
summer, and he had been working very hard for a long time 
trying to prevent violence in the strike, speaking many times a 
day as a strike leader. He was thoroughly tired out, and the 
thirteen days in prison were a wonderful rest to him. The 
prison was much cleaner and more comfortable than his home 
in the slums. Besides, nobody was allowed to see him, and he 
had genuine quiet. 

He seized the opportunity to finish his next book. His ex¬ 
perience at nineteen, which he thought of as “Crossing the 
Death Line,” had furnished the title of his first autobiographi¬ 
cal novel. This had so thoroughly expressed the philosophical 
strivings of the youth of Japan that it had become a best seller 
when published a year previously. It happened that the second 
of the series, called “A Shooter at the Sun,” was to be released 
to the public while Kagawa lay in prison. There was such a 
demand for it that the booksellers in Tokyo had agreed among 
themselves that they would not compete with one another; all 
of them would release this book at the same moment, at one 


- 11 - 


o’clock on a certain afternoon. It is said that there were queues 
of people, in some cases 250 long, waiting outside the biggest 
bookstores to buy this book in Tokyo. Meanwhile its author 
was down in Kobe finishing the third of the series, which he 
named from the prison walls, “Listening to the Voice of the 


After this Kagawa advised the laborers against further vio¬ 
lence; that they should be satisfied with their gains and not 
strike any more for a while. The farmers had read in the news¬ 
papers about the labor movement and were sending delegations 
from all over Japan to ask Kagawa to help them. He decided 
to give his concentrated attention to the farmers for the next 
few years. 

In Japan farms average 2^2 acres in size, and such a farm the 
landowner sublets to several tenants and their families. Some¬ 
one has said recently that the Japanese farm is hardly big 
enough for the American farmer to store his farm implements 
upon. The tenant farmer, 70 per cent of the total, has to pro¬ 
vide his own tools and fertilizer and to pay the landowner on an 
average of 55 per cent of his crop as land rent. Naturally there 
are disputes, more than in any other country in the world, be¬ 
tween these tenants and the landowners, and neither of them 
get rich. 

Kagawa had been watching the farmers’ plight in Japan for 
a long while, and a few months after he turned his attention 
toward them regular delegations from 34 provinces were meet¬ 
ing in his little slum chapel in Kobe, using it as their dormitory 
and preliminary conference room, while they rented the Kobe 
Y.M.C.A. for their formal organization. This was in April 
1922. As president of the new organization, Kagawa was able 
to put in a man by the name of Sugiyama, who was extraor¬ 
dinarily well prepared for the job. I shall have to postpone 
his story till later, but it ought to be almost as well known as 
Kagawa’s. 

Kagawa devoted two full years to the farmers, but he wanted 
to give them a great deal more. They were in need of the same 
sort of intensive education by which he had prepared the la¬ 
borers for their organized activities. But by this time Com¬ 
munism was coming in and competing with the educational 
work Kagawa could do in this much wider territory of the 
rural areas. Kagawa himself was regarded as a dangerous 
character because he had been promoting labor organization and 


- 12 - 


now farmer organization. He was blacklisted. He was under 
constant police surveillance. 

And then one day the Emperor came to Kobe. Kagawa paid 
a visit to his missionary friends on the hill. But he sat on the 
edge of his chair, and seemed in a great hurry. 

“Why don’t you relax and have a good time? You usually 
spend the afternoon with us,” said the missionary’s wife. 

“I can’t keep my detective waiting,” said Kagawa. 

Now Mrs. Myers, the missionary’s wife, knew that Kagawa’s 
life was in danger almost every day, and she was delighted to 
think that he had a detective protecting him. 

“Since when have you had a personal bodyguard?” she asked. 

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” he replied. “You see, the 
Emperor is in Kobe, and I am on the blacklist, and every one 
on the blacklist has a detective assigned to shadow him so that 
he won’t assassinate the Emperor.” 

Kagawa had already started his attempt to win this man to be 
a Christian; so it was much more important to preserve his 
friendship with him than to visit his missionary friends that 
day. In a moment Mrs. Myers went out on the front porch to 
bid Kagawa good-by—and also to get a firsthand look at a real 
detective. The man was standing outside the gate waiting pa¬ 
tiently, and she saw Kagawa go off arm in arm with him, 
earnestly trying to influence him to be a Christian. 

VI 

September 1, 1923, at high noon, came the great earthquake 
which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama. Everybody’s dinner 
was cooking on a charcoal brazier. The quake toppled the paper 
sliding doors and light wood frames oTtHe houses down on top 
of the braziers, and conflagrations started simultaneously in a 
thousand places. On the west side of Tokyo, where the more 
prosperous people lived, there were servant folk to fight the 
fires, big gardens and parks to break their fury. But on the 
east side the gardens were tiny, the houses small and crowded 
close together, and there were no parks whatever. The people 
rushed out into the streets with bandana handkerchief bundles 
and toddling children, carrying the old folks and the babies on 
their backs. The flames came up behind them, and they flqd 
in desperate haste. There was a policeman who advised them 
to go to the one open space near by in a factory yard. From 
thirty-six to forty thousand people crowded in there. The flames 
came down on all four sides hemming them in. In the morning 
only two hundred were left alive. 


- 13 - 


Kagawa got the news at six o’clock on Sunday morning from 
a laborer who met him on the streets bound churchward, and 
carrying a newspaper. The church resolved itself into a com¬ 
mittee meeting—but that was quite as usual! At the end of the 
two and a half hours of worship and practical planning, the 
entire congregation scattered to the twenty-seven other churches 
of Kobe which would have their services at ten o’clock in the 
morning. By noon all the Christian community of Kobe had 
appointed its representatives and the committee met, choosing 
Kagawa and another pastor to send up to Tokyo for relief 
work. They got off on the afternoon boat, for there were no 
trains running. 

Kagawa reached Tokyo after many adventures, to find the 
government buildings in ruins, and government officials non¬ 
plussed over the situation. All of a sudden the official who was 
bearing the heaviest responsibility for rehabilitation realized 
that Kagawa was the best bulwark against the feared Commu¬ 
nism, which would certainly now flame out worse than the 
physical conflagration in the completely devastated east side of 
Tokyo, where hundreds of thousands of people were milling 
around in a place as bare of human habitation as the original 
plain before a house had been built on it. So, although he had 
come to Tokyo to work with the churches, Kagawa found to his 
astonishment that in this crisis the government had reversed 
its attitude toward him and instead of keeping him on the black¬ 
list was asking him to take a conspicuous part in the work of 
social as well as physical rebuilding. He was the one man in 
Japan of the educated classes who had lived down among the 
poor for years—in his case for fourteen years and eight months. 
He knew their psychology. He could lead them constructively. 
The Premier became the Chairman of the Reconstruction Com¬ 
mission, but Kagawa was asked to furnish much of the brain 
work for it, and to give his full time for the next three years 
to educating and organizing the social workers they, had gath¬ 
ered from all Japan in this spot of greatest need. 

Of course, Kagawa responded to this call as a patriotic duty, 
but at the same time he did not neglect the churches. He took 
a census and found that 142 churches were left standing in the 
Tokyo region, although many had been destroyed. He arranged 
to preach two nights in each of the usable buildings, and 5,800 
people decided to become Christians. 

VII 

After that came the time when, in a similar series of meet- 


- 14 - 


ings in Osaka, another 5,000 gathered, and later the Protestant 
churches realized that this young pastor who was doing so many 
extraordinary things among the poor was really the evangelistic 
leader they needed for all Japan. They asked him to organize 
them in what you have read of in American church journals 
as “The Kingdom of God Movement.” He promised to give his 
full time for the next three years to doing so, from 1930 on¬ 
ward. 

Kagawa’s definition of the Kingdom of God Movement, 
however, includes all these forms of organizing—the organiz¬ 
ing of laborers and farmers and social workers, as well as pas¬ 
tors. The latter was only one section of his total program for 
the Kingdom of God Movement. It is interesting to note that 
in Japan one man has actually organized all four of these 
significant leadership groups in society. It is probably a unique 
story, and it gives hope for solidarity and achievement in the 
future. Kagawa is only forty-six now, and there is much more 
to be expected from his leadership. His whole movement is in 
fact a youth movement. In five years of this Kingdom of God 
Movement, up to the end of 1933, there were 65,000 cards of 
decision handed into Kagawa’s hands through the ushers in his 
own meetings, not counting those of the more than forty other 
evangelists or lecturers on the official lists of the Kingdom of 
God Movement. 

An amusing incident occurred at the outset of this crusade. 
The pastors understood that Kagawa had promised them his 
full time for the next three years. I was present at one com¬ 
mittee meeting of the central executive committee in Tokyo 
when one of its members rushed in bearing a newspaper with 
Kagawa’s picture in it, and a long article telling about how he 
had now been made head of the Social Bureau of Tokyo. “He 
has broken his promise to us,” this pastor cried. “He’s gone off 
and forgotten.” 

Kagawa himself was away at the moment on evangelistic 
work in the interior, but he came back to the next committee 
meeting and explained that he had not deserted the pastors. He 
believed in practicing what he preached, he said, and he had 
now been preaching on a nation-wide scale for some time, and 
he didn’t have the face to go ahead and preach to the Japanese 
people on a still wider scale without practicing in a commen¬ 
surate way. The incoming Mayor of Tokyo, a very socially 
minded man, Horikiri by name, had sent for him, I think, and 
said that he could not carry on as Mayor and do the things he 
wanted to accomplish unless Kagawa would become head of 


- 15 - 


the Social Bureau, and he had offered him a big salary of 18,- 
000 yen a year with emoluments. (In purchasing power a yen 
is about equal to a dollar, although in actual exchange it is 
only about 28 cents.) 

Kagawa had considered a while and then had said to the 
Mayor: “1*11 accept the job on two conditions—first, that you 
don’t make me take the money, and second that you obey me.” 
The Mayor had accepted his conditions, and Kagawa had taken 
the job. While he bore this tremendous civic responsibility he 
spent ten days a month of office time, from nine in the morning 
to five in the evening, in the Social Bureau. The evenings of 
those ten days he spent in preaching in the 268 churches in 
the Tokyo region. There were more churches there than in 
any other part of Japan and they needed a great deal of atten¬ 
tion. The other twenty days he was all over the country on his 
evangelistic program. At the end of four years of it 65,000 con¬ 
verts had been gathered in, because, as Kagawa says, “Chris¬ 
tianity is common sense in Japan now. The Japanese like to see 
practice go along with preaching.” 

VIII 

What Kagawa had been doing as head of the Social Bureau 
was to turn its old-fashioned charities into cooperatives. Japan 
has experienced the depression twice as long as we have had it 
in America, and the middle class people, 90 per cent of them in 
Tokyo, had lost their property and been reduced below the 
poverty level. But they had kept their self-respect, and Kagawa 
knew that if the Social Bureau was really to serve them, they 
must have not mere charity but democratic self-help organiza¬ 
tions. All through the years he had been trying to meet the 
needs of the industrial laborers in Japan, he had been studying 
also the precedents to be found in the history of England and 
Europe. He had read the history of the “hungry forties” in 
England, the decade between 1840 and 1850 when there was 
so much economic distress and political disillusionment due to 
the introduction of machines. 

During this period three great techniques were invented in 
England as efforts to meet the situation. One of them was 
trade unionism. Another was political socialism, the effort to 
get better conditions through the use of the vote. I must tell 
you that after Kagawa had organized both laborers’ and farm¬ 
ers’ federations, he got them together and succeeded in a cam¬ 
paign for universal manhood suffrage, a reform which had 
failed to carry for thirty years, while only intellectuals were 


- 16 - 


backing it. It was actually achieved just ten years ago, in May 
1925, and there is a strong movement for women’s suffrage, 
which Kagawa has aided. 

The third great technique Kagawa discovered in the history 
of England in the hungry ’forties was based on the “democracy 
of the stomach.” There were 28 poor flannel weavers in the 
village of Rochdale near Manchester who had asked for a rise 
in wages and had been refused. They badly needed it; and they 
had plenty of other troubles, too. But the worst of them was 
that they could not buy flour anywhere in Rochdale which did 
not have cement dust in it to make it heavier so that they would 
have to pay more, and of course without any regard for their 
stomachs. So the weavers put their wits and their pennies to¬ 
gether, saving each of them a tuppence (a nickel) a week for 
more than a year, and on December 21, 1844, with their com¬ 
bined savings of $140 they opened their own store, becoming 
owners of it as well as buyers from it. They put into it pure 
flour of a kind they once had been able to produce on their own 
farms, and butter and oatmeal. 

The weavers were so poor at the start that they could afford 
to have their store open only two evenings a week. It was ac¬ 
tually seven years before they could have that store open every 
day in the week. But the principles on which they started were 
so sound that today those 28 weavers—and one woman among 
them, Ann Treedale by name—have become 28 million. They 
are operating one-sixth of the retail business of England, and 
150 factories. Their Rochdale plan has spread into forty coun¬ 
tries of the world, and has a membership as big as the popula¬ 
tion of China, 500 million. 

In 1918 Kagawa began to organize the industrial laborers of 
Japan into Rochdale Consumers’ Cooperatives. Because he was 
100 per cent loyal to the Rochdale principles, his cooperatives 
became a model for other cooperatives in Japan, and are so cited 
in the official reports. 

Kagawa did not start the Cooperative Movement in Japan. 
In 1900, only 30 years after capitalism had been introduced into 
Japan, a minister of the interior, Tasuke Hirata, had become 
concerned over the danger of violent revolution. Not as a gov¬ 
ernment official but as an individual he had imported one form 
of the Cooperative Movement, the Schulze-Delitzsch system of 
credit unions from Germany. The credit union is a poor man’s 
bank, a small savings and loan association which saves the poor 
from the loan sharks It had been started in Germany by a 
young Christian mayor, Raiffeisen by name, who found himself 


- 17 - 


in the midst of a famine-stricken village with many other fam¬ 
ine-stricken villages around him. Raiffeisen had the same habit 
Kagawa had, that of getting down on his knees and praying to 
God when he met a difficulty. He asked God what to do with 
his famine-stricken village, and God gave him a bank—a bank 
which would help the poor man first. This was the Raiffeisen 
credit union, which had spread all over Germany. Later a 
modification of it was invented which did not help the poor 
man quite so much; this was the Schulze-Delitzsch system. 
This, however, was quite successful in Japan and became the 
typical farmers’ bank, encountering no opposition because all 
the farmers are poor there. There are 12,000 credit unions in 
Japan now, but Kagawa has been doing his best lately to make 
them of the Raiffeisen type instead of the Schulze-Delitzsch 
type, so that they will help the poor tenant farmer instead of 
the more prosperous landowner. 

When Kagawa started in 1918 to organize the city laborers 
into consumers’ cooperatives, he thus found an existing coop¬ 
erative federation to tie to, and some fairly good laws to work 
under. His chief difficulty at the outset came from the Com¬ 
munists. The year before, in 1917, Lenin had become the leader 
of the government in Russia. Lenin thought that the big Con¬ 
sumers’ Cooperative Movement in Russia—the biggest in the 
world, quantitatively—was much too “pale and palliative” for 
the social revolution, and he abolished it. 

A year later, when Kagawa began to organize the same sys¬ 
tem in Japan, he had to spend many a night under the same 
mosquito net with a laborer Communist, arguing pro and con. 
“You are trying to start a palliative,” his friend would say, and 
Kagawa would try to show him how this was not a palliative 
but the only thoroughgoing way in which to bring to pass eco¬ 
nomic reconstruction. 

Then Lenin got his famines. He couldn’t manage the prob¬ 
lem of distribution all over Russia without the cooperatives. 
In 1921 he reestablished them and then Kagawa’s erstwhile op¬ 
ponents, the Communists, came flocking to the doors of his 
now well-established cooperatives, asking to be admitted. By 
this time he had learned that the Communists’ chief idea was 
to use any such organization as a vehicle for their propaganda 
for violent revolution, and he would not admit them. So they 
went off and started another system of cooperatives, called 
the Moscow system, in which the profits are given to the state. 
This system flourished for a while among the laborers side by 
side with Kagawa’s Rochdale cooperatives, which gave the 


- 18 - 


profits to the purchasers in proportion to their purchases, but 
the Moscow cooperatives died out after a while, and the Roch¬ 
dale system is the permanent one in Japan, as in every other 
country. 

IX 

You will want to know what has made these Rochdale coop¬ 
eratives so successful, and it is as simple as a-b-c. 

First, Economic Democracy. One man, one vote, or one 
woman, one vote, even though one person might conceivably 
put in ten times as much money as another. Voting is on the 
basis of personality, and this is a great change from our present 
system. In 1776 we tried to start a democracy in America, and 
we thought that it was enough to establish it in politics—one 
man, one vote, in politics. Unconsciously we were bringing over 
at the same time from Europe the old system of economics 
which dated back to the divine right of kings. In 1776 the rich¬ 
est 2 per cent in America owned only 5 per cent of the wealth, 
and economics didn’t matter very much, but now the richest 
2 per cent own 80 per cent of the wealth, while at the other end 
of the scale one-third of the American citizens live below the 
poverty level. 

Thus we have reached the same extremes in economic in¬ 
equality inside our American national family that Kagawa be¬ 
gan with in his Japanese national family, and in the last five or 
six years of economic breakdown we have suffered all sorts of 
other agonies, the sort of thing that he suffered in his boyhood, 
resulting from the economic inequalities in his family. We are 
in a position to seek his solution, and we find it, strangely 
enough, not away across the world in Japan, but in these coun¬ 
tries nearest to us in geographical location and race and culture 
and religion—the countries of northwest Europe, the countries 
that had sense enough to stay out of the world war, excepting 
Finland, which by reason of its political connection with Russia 
was forced to go in. (Finland is the only one of the belligerents 
who has paid her war debts to the United States.) England, 
too, is a relatively cooperative country, but we must realize that 
in England the movement has remained a working-class one; 
the upper class people who got England into the war have not 
yet been affected by it. These upper class people of England 
think in terms of British imperialism all over the world. Eco¬ 
nomic democracy does not seem to exist for them yet, although 
it has been a fact in history for ninety years. 

Second, the Rochdale weavers made their next principle 


- 19 - 


Fairness to Capital All invested capital was to have interest 
at the current rate. 

Third, they made the discovery that they must be fair not 
only to invested capital, but that there must also be Fairness to 
the Customer in their little store. You have seen plenty of 
stores in the last five or six years with good stocks and a good 
staff, which still were not successful because they did not have 
a sufficient volume of trade. The weavers had the wit to under¬ 
stand that it is the customer who makes the store, and so they 
decided that they would pay back the profits to the purchasers 
in proportion to their purchases. This was fair and also it put 
the whole plan upon the basis of human need. It is a rough but 
pretty accurate way to put back purchasing power among the 
multitudes who need it. In the last five years of economic 
breakdown in other parts of the world and other parts of Eng¬ 
land, it has enabled the English Cooperative Wholesale Society 
to give back more than 600 million dollars to its members. 

This has a fundamental relation to world peace. Do you 
know what got the United States into the world war? Wilson 
had just been inaugurated on the slogan, “He kept us out of 
war,” when Page, our Ambassador to England, sent a cable¬ 
gram to Wilson, saying in effect: “Unless we go into the world 
war in a hurry, we will lose our profits in Europe.” In a month 
and a day we were in the world war! The full text of this 
cablegram was released by the United States government early 
in January 1935 as the result of the munitions investigation by 
the senate. It was released to all the press agencies, but only 
five of the newspapers of the United States would print it! 
Why? Perhaps for the same reason that the father of Colonel 
Lindbergh was ostracized almost as much as his son has been 
praised, when in the war period he wrote a book giving the sta¬ 
tistics already quoted, that 2 per cent of the United States’ citi¬ 
zens own 80 per cent of the wealth. The elder Lindbergh’s book 
was suppressed at the time, but now, fifteen years later, we 
have passed through sufficient suffering so that we are some¬ 
what ready to face the fact he tried to publish in the interests 
of all the people. Discussion is no longer spelled “disloyalty.” 
Whether or not the newspapers of the United States will pub¬ 
lish the facts, the great body of the common people want them 
and want to know what to do about them. 

We are facing the possibility of another world war which we 
know would mean the annihilation of humanity, because of the 
scientific perfection of our instruments of destruction. How 
shall we prevent it? Kagawa says there are four kinds of 


- 20 - 


pacifists. There is the emotional pacifist, who just naturally 
hates war; the conscientious pacifist, who gets into prison be¬ 
cause of his conscientious objection to war; and the rational 
pacifist who starts a League of Nations. Probably most of us 
are all three of these kinds of pacifists at the same time, and all 
of them are important. But Kagawa says no one of them will 
attain their objectives until the fourth kind of pacifist, the 
economic pacifist, gets in his work. Wars are caused by eco¬ 
nomic competition and the only way to stop them is by recon¬ 
struction in economics. 

In 1917, when we got into the world war, the sequence of 
events had been something like this. Two per cent of the people 
had come to own 80 per cent of the wealth. They couldn’t spend 
it on themselves, so they had to follow economic tradition and re¬ 
invest it to make more profits. (I am not blaming anyone. It 
is nobody’s fault. It’s only a defect in the system.) By 1917 
and long before, America had come to the end of its pioneering 
period. It was no longer possible to reinvest profitably such 
large sums of wealth as the two per cent had accumulated in¬ 
side our own country, so they had to take it over to Europe. 
The dollar, when it goes overseas, is entirely conscienceless, and 
yet it demands government protection. Thus all of us were 
forced into the world war to protect the profits of the 2 per cent 
in Europe. 

Kagawa says that only 5 per cent of the Japanese are in fa¬ 
vor of militarism, and the other 95 per cent are pacifist. It is 
easy to understand this in the light of our own experience, for 
I doubt if more than 5 per cent would possibly have gone into 
the world war for the motive of protecting our profits in Eu¬ 
rope. Now we are facing the possibility of war with Japan, and 
for the same sort of reason. The Christian Century of March 
6, 1935, contained an article by an impartial observer who is 
not at all a partisan of Japan, listing the reasons why we might 
get into a war with that country. Every one of them is con¬ 
nected with American imperialism in China. How shall we pre¬ 
vent this ? The only way to do it is to work on this business of 
“economic theology,” as Kagawa calls it, by which at one stroke 
we can guarantee both world peace and plenty for all. 

Do not make the mistake here in expecting it to come over¬ 
night. There is the “inevitability of gradualness” about this 
method. It has been growing slowly for ninety years, but now 
that the time is ripe for it well informed leaders think that if we 
work hard for fifteen years in America we can catch up with 
Europe in this business of cooperative economics. America is 


- 21 - 


the richest country in the world, and if we do catch up with 
Europe, we shall have guaranteed the financial destinies of the 
world, and prevented the world war that we fear. The way to 
do it is to withdraw these vast sums of wealth which are being 
accumulated through the automatic power production of the 
twentieth century—not to return the profits to invested capital, 
but to put them back into the hands of the millions of pur¬ 
chasers who need them to go on with their purchasing. 

X 

In April 1934 I met an American lady in the presence of Dr. 
Kagawa in Tokyo. She had come to Japan to dedicate some 
mission buildings for which she had raised the money, and then 
had insisted on seeing Kagawa. She said to me: “The mind of 
America has changed in the last five years of economic break¬ 
down. You should come and tell Americans about Kagawa's 
whole program, the things that are not written in the books. 
You know, the books devote pages to his personality, but they 
don't tell what he is driving at.” 

I crossed the Pacific Asiatic third-class for $60, not knowing 
at all what I should find here. I routed myself by Vancouver 
so as to be able to stop at Minneapolis, for the one pamphlet 
I had received about the Cooperative Movement in America had 
been written by Hugh J. Hughes, who lives in Minneapolis. I 
reached Chicago and filled a few engagements kindly made for 
me by this lady. The remainder of the time, for a year, I have 
been completely busy, without any vacation, just telling the 
American people, especially the church people, w r hat they so 
much want to know about this Cooperative Movement. 

I have been educated, myself, by a great many responses in 
my meetings from people who have had experience in England 
and Europe in this movement. 

“We always used to go to the cooperative store in Scotland 
and ask for Danish butter because it was the best,” one lady said 
to me, “and then at the end of the year we would get our 
patronage dividend, and it would pay our entire house rent, w T ith 
sometimes a little bit for savings besides.” 

I thought that was a good story, and told it to the next Scotch 
lady I met. She took the wind out of my sails by saying, “They 
must have lived in a small house.” I thought a while, and then 
decided that made the story better than ever, for of course 
they did live in a small house. The Rochdale movement begins 
with people who have to live in small houses. It begins in situ¬ 
ations of economic distress, and that is why it is pertinent to our 


- 22 - 


situation in America, and throughout the Occident, at the pres¬ 
ent moment. 

Another lady present at this same meeting of good Presby¬ 
terian women in their annual conference for the state of Michi¬ 
gan, had also come from Scotland. She said, “My grandmother 
taught me, concerning the consumers’ cooperative system, to say 
‘the more you eat, the more the dividend,’ ” and that is the by¬ 
word for it among the canny Scotch. A great many of them 
seem to know it, as I have met them in my various meetings. “I 
wonder why I never told about this movement when I came to 
America to be married,” said one of these ladies to me. “Of 
course, I know that the impression here in America was that 
anything we told that was good about the old country was mere 
bragging—there was no truth in it. But on the other hand, I 
knew my grandmother had thought it terrible for me to come to 
the United States, because that was the country to which they 
had always sent their ex-convicts!” 

A pastor of a church in Columbus voiced the same wonder¬ 
ment. “Why have I not begun before to work for this move¬ 
ment in America?” he said. “Twenty-five years ago in England 
I was living in a boarding house kept by a widow who was ac¬ 
tually buying the house over our heads out of her patronage 
dividends.” 

“The Cooperative Movement in England takes care of its 
widows. My own mother-in-law was set up in business after 
her husband’s death and given both a house and means of liveli¬ 
hood merely because of her membership in a consumers’ co¬ 
operative,” said Michael Dodd in Wichita, Kansas, and he told 
other stories of the way in which the consumers’ cooperatives 
can be depended upon in an emergency of human need. 

Some business man will now be asking, “But what about 
the independent retail dealer who is displaced?” My first an¬ 
swer to that question is that the cooperatives don’t displace him. 
It is the chain store rather than the cooperative which is the 
real menace to the independent grocer. The cooperative, accord¬ 
ing to the Rochdale plan, sells at the current rates—or perhaps 
it would be better to say the normal rates—and so doesn’t start 
a price war to undercut the independent dealer. Moreover, it 
invites him eventually into a place in its own ranks. There is 
no coercion about this. It begins as small as a mustard seed and 
grows gradually, but by and by when the birds come to roost in 
its branches, the retailer is likely to choose to be one of the birds. 

In Sweden, the cooperative movement is taking on 5,000 men 
a year, experts and executives as well as men in the ranks. The 


- 23 - 


business man who sees the future will study this movement, 
perhaps as a church member leading a church group in a thor¬ 
ough-going study; having thus educated his own customers he 
will organize them into a consumers’ society which will reem¬ 
ploy him on a permanent and good salary to be the manager 
of the business. Thus he will be guaranteed both security and 
the profound satisfactions that come from prestige based on 
genuine community service. It may, of course, take quite a 
period of preliminary education to get all business men to see 
this. The pastor of the business man’s church may have to take 
the lead in educating him; then the business man who has had 
the economic responsibility hitherto will combine his feeling 
of economic responsibility with that other feeling which he has 
of Christian responsibility and become in his turn a leader in 
the new movement. 

There is an important place right here for the women’s mis¬ 
sionary society. The woman is the consumer par excellence. 
Her husband is the producer, and as such he may have poked 
fun at her job of consuming, thinking it a slight matter for her 
to do the shopping and the cooking for the individual family. 
What every woman knows, however, is that this business of 
consuming requires just as much skill as that of producing for 
the individual family. It will take only a slight study of the 
actualities of present-day affairs for the woman consumer to 
realize the infinite importance of a nation-wide business of con¬ 
sumption. 

In this country at the start we had an economics of scarcity. 
We needed to produce, and we produced and produced and pro¬ 
duced, until all of a sudden we had overproduction, and we 
thought we needed to limit production. So we burned up car¬ 
loads of food and poured out milk on the ground in one place 
while the babies were still needing it in another. We plowed 
under the cotton and the corn and killed the little pigs, and the 
paradox of the economics of plenty into which we have now 
moved is that it is because we have too much that we have too 
little. More than twenty millions are unemployed or dependent 
on those who are unemployed and therefore are suffering. All 
this is because we lack an adequate system of consumption to 
go along with our system of production on a nation-wide scale. 
I think we can trust the women to grasp this fact and to take 
some initiative in educating their own husbands. 

Since I landed in this country, I have come to think of my 
own cousins as typical of the American business man. The wife 
of one of them was very anxious to get him educated on this 


- 24 - 


matter of consumers' cooperation, and so arranged for him to 
drive us up to a summer conference. We talked hard and fast 
all the way, and yet at the end of the trip she was afraid he 
hadn’t grasped the importance of the idea. But the second time 
I saw him, two months later in the summer, he had asked her 
to invite me to dinner to convert a pastor, and then he took the 
words right out of my mouth. He said: “You know, we have 
got to come to this cooperative economics. It’s the only way 
to do business in the future.” And he cited the case of the credit 
union in his own company as proof. This man was in charge 
of the Kraft cheese demonstration at the World’s Fair in Chi¬ 
cago. 

Another cousin lives in one ot the most conservative cities in 
America, and is a wholesaler in pottery. He met me with the 
statement that 80 per cent of the people of the United States 
are convinced of the need for economic change, and then he 
continued, “I am interested in the cooperatives from the ideal¬ 
istic point of view, but also selfishly. I want to sell my pottery 
to them, for I know that they would pay their bills. They are 
good business.” This seems to be the reason why many middle¬ 
men are becoming interested in the cooperatives. I heard of a 
bank man who learned to like the consumers’ cooperative in 
his community because its manager would periodically bring 
in a check for several hundred dollars and make a bona fide 
deposit of it in the local bank. This helped both the bank and 
the community. The chain store man also would bring in a 
similar sum of money and appear to deposit it, but in reality he 
would turn it into a draft on New York, and the money would 
go off to Amsterdam. 

The churches have a great opportunity here. For hundreds 
of years they have been educating their members in the teach¬ 
ings of the Bible. “He that will be greatest among you, let him 
become least of all and servant of all.” (Mark 9:44.) What is 
this but the business man becoming the employe of his own 
customers? Now of course, to do so he may have to give up 
some of his inflated prestige based on the mere possession of 
money. It may take a redemption as well as an education to 
change his attitudes and desires to such an extent. 

“Christ was prophet, priest and king,” Kagawa says, and in 
developing this Cooperative Movement we need first of all the 
work of the prophet, who is the educator. We need a lot of 
education, from six months to a year of it at the outset. The 
priest is a redeemer. We have done a great deal of soul saving 
in individual religion, and we need to do some in social religion 


- 25 - 


as well. The pastor may have to do a great deal of the work 
of redemption among his own business-men church members, 
but when that work has proceeded far enough the work of the 
king can commence. The king is the organizer, and it says in 
the Book of Revelations that we are all meant to be kings. In 
the Consumers’ Cooperative Movement, where the people’s ini¬ 
tiative is evoked and integrated, we attain to this collective king- 
ship. The ideal for the business man then becomes different 
from the old divine right of the multimillionaires. When we 
beheaded King Charles I, I think we beheaded the divine right 
of kings. At least, since then we have never had quite the same 
friendliness for the idea. (Don’t think that I approve of any 
kind of violence, but this is merely a fact in the history of 
long ago.) In the same way, when Insull was exposed recently, 
even though nominally acquitted, I think that the divine right 
of multimillionaires was similarly decapitated. 

We have already passed into a new era, and perhaps the head 
of the Swedish Cooperative Union might be a good example of 
it. He has been offered a salary of $100,000 a year in capitalis¬ 
tic business, but he prefers to put his $100,000 ability at the 
service of the Cooperative Movement. There he gets $5,000 a 
year, but he has the love of the whole Swedish people and the 
prestige based not upon inflated money power, but upon genuine 
service to the whole community. He also has permanent se¬ 
curity. Popular magazines in America are publishing articles 
about the happy state of Sweden today because of the large 
amount of cooperative business which is interpenetrating the 
existing capitalistic system there. 

XI 

Kagawa says there are seven forms of the Cooperative Move¬ 
ment which we need in an interlocking and international system 
to guarantee both peace and plenty for all. (We might reduce 
these seven to four, because the last three are all different forms 
of consumers’ cooperatives.) 

The first form is the basic store form, the consumers' co¬ 
operative of which we have been talking. 

The second is the producers’ cooperative, which grew out of 
the consumers’ movement in Denmark. It was Pastor Sonne 
there who was preaching to harbor laborers down on the quay, 
away out of his usual environment, when they said: “Reverend 
Pastor, it is very good that you teach us to find God, but could 
you not also help us to find our daily bread ?” Sonne accepted 
this challenge, and began to look about for a method. Provi- 


- 26 - 


dentially, at that moment a friend informed him about the little 
movement that had just started in Rochdale, and he began it 
in Denmark. Later a business man, Jorgensen by name, de¬ 
voted his life and his fortune to extending this movement. Still 
later, because Denmark is chiefly agricultural, the greatest de¬ 
velopment came in producers’ societies out in the country. 

We have no space here to tell the wonderful story of Den¬ 
mark, of how this movement has really saved it from economic 
despair, but we may remark in passing that Kagawa says Den¬ 
mark is the most Christian country in the world, because of the 
excellent balance it has between the consumer and producer 
sides of the Cooperative Movement. The Danish farmer, they 
say, is a member of five or six different sorts of cooperatives 
at the same time. Practically all his economic operations are 
carried on cooperatively, and his income, from being one of the 
worst, has in about eighty years risen to be the best average 
income of all the farmers of Europe. His degree of culture is 
way ahead of that of the average American farmer. Every 
Danish farmer has his library full of books, a special room de¬ 
voted to them. He is interested in all world affairs; and when 
he goes to his farmers’ dinner parties, they say he wears a dress 
suit! 

Denmark has abolished her navy, having no fear of inter¬ 
national wars. She does not need to fear economic collision 
with any foreign country because she has solved her problem 
by exporting all her products by prearrangements through the 
international marketing cooperatives, which are the third form 
of the cooperative movement to be noted. The Danish pro¬ 
ducers’ cooperatives sell their bacon and butter and eggs to the 
British consumers’ cooperatives. They do not need to waste 
their energy on advertising and so can place their whole em¬ 
phasis on quality. Therefore, as you remember, the people in 
Scotland ask for the Danish butter because it is the best, and we 
have it on the high authority of our Minister to Denmark, Ruth 
Bryan Owen, that if ever a question should arise about any 
Danish egg that was being eaten in Great Britain, you could 
trace it back, not only to the particular farm in Denmark where 
it was laid, but to the particular hen that laid it. 

We have already told the story of the credit union, the fourth 
form of the Cooperative Movement. And the fifth is the utili¬ 
ties cooperative. Both of these are merely adaptations of the 
consumers’ cooperative, the one to banking and the other to 
consumer ownership of utilities. In the Tennessee Valley Au¬ 
thority there is just now a fascinating development of utilities’ 


- 27 - 


cooperatives, which are one step better than public political 
ownership, being more secure in the hands of the consumer 
owners than in the hands of the politicians. In Japan we have 
a great development of utilities’ cooperatives, including land 
utility cooperatives. 

Japan is about the size of the state of Montana, and its popu¬ 
lation of 65,000,000 must be supported on a territory 10,000 
square miles smaller than that of the state of California, only 
15 per cent of which is arable. For its arable area, it is the 
most densely populated country on the face of the globe. Land, 
therefore, is hard to get hold of in Japan, and very few can 
afford to own it. But there are the mountains. Kagawa is teach¬ 
ing his people to plant tree crops on these hitherto uncultivated 
areas, to raise chestnuts and walnuts upon them for human 
food and acorns for hog feeding; and also to import goats and 
sheep from Australia for milk and woolen clothing, since there 
is not sufficient pasturage for larger animals. The individual 
farmer cannot do this, but whole villages are organizing them¬ 
selves into land cooperatives such as the one which is the theme 
of Kagawa’s rural novel entitled “A Grain of Wheat”—the 
title suggested by the twelfth chapter of John. 

This novel, which embodies Kagawa’s pioneering in the re¬ 
construction of the starving villages of Japan, at once became 
another best seller. After running in serial form it was pub¬ 
lished as a book and ran into hundreds of editions. Then it 
was filmed by a commercial company, and has been shown by 
another commercial company—many copies of it simultaneously 
—all over the country for the past four years. The literary sec¬ 
retary of the World Student Christian Federation wrote from 
Geneva asking for a copy of it to be shown at the world pro¬ 
hibition congress in London during the summer of 1934. The 
film was so popular in Japan that I had great difficulty in getting 
a copy of it for America. It had been ordered to be shown in 
all the grade schools of the Tokyo district by the district gov¬ 
ernor. 

But when I came to show this film at an American state 
university, the faculty audience commented upon it, “It con¬ 
tains too much Christianity and too much prohibition for the 
United States.” Immediately the representative of the milkmen, 
who was organizing them into a cooperative and was present at 
the showing of this film, was on his feet in an impassioned pro¬ 
test against the faculty decision. Being the only proletarian 
present he was saying: “This film gives us the release of per¬ 
sonality that we must have before we can become leaders in 


- 28 - 


organizing the Cooperative Movement. We of the laboring 
classes are oppressed by inferiority complexes. This film gives 
us the spiritual inspiration we need to release us for genuine 
emancipation and economic reconstruction.” 

I may remark also that the leader among the faculty people 
wrote a letter to me several weeks later, saying: “That film has 
been working in my mind, and I have repented. I think we do 
need it in America/' 

The last two of the seven forms of the Cooperative Move¬ 
ment urged by Kagawa are the insurance cooperatives and the 
mutual aid cooperatives. Cooperative insurance includes all 
forms of social insurance—widows’ pensions and old age pen¬ 
sions, and even education insurance. You send your children 
to college, and you go to college yourself, on education insur¬ 
ance. 

But everything else in philanthropy, relief and charity, not 
included under the insurances, is covered, Kagawa says, by 
mutual aid cooperatives. These grow normally after the con¬ 
sumers' and producers’ cooperatives have come to the point 
where they can vote funds by common consent for the purposes 
of mutual aid. Thus we are relieved on the one hand from the 
mounting money burden for relief which now oppresses us in 
America. On the other hand, the mutual aid system eliminates 
the inferiority complex of the man on relief, which demoralizes 
him. It is said that after a man has been unemployed for two 
years, he is no longer employable. There is also the correspond¬ 
ing and equally serious superiority complex of the case worker, 
who gets an inflated ego because so much money has been put 
into her hands to administer. “We should like to see every so¬ 
cial worker in her grave,” laughed a committee of the unem¬ 
ployed recently—when it was in a good humor. “We would 
willingly dig the graves for all the social workers,” they re¬ 
iterated. 

In contrast to the exaggerated and artificial relations between 
social workers and relief recipients that everybody is talking 
about now, and that are one of the most serious problems in this 
present situation for religious people, there is the story of the 
head of Kagawa's cooperative hospital in Tokyo. This man, 
a children’s specialist at the top. of his profession and in the 
prime of life, told us on the opening day of the hospital why he 
had gone into it. He had been the head of the children’s bureau 
of the Tokyo medical social service department, and had been 
getting a good salary with a perfectly secure position for life. 
But he said he had been sixteen or seventeen years in medical 


- 29 - 


social service, and he had found that he simply could not fulfill 
his professional life purpose on the old charity basis. He said 
that the great majority of the folks who needed him had too 
much self-respect to come on the dole. They would let their 
children die first. On the other hand, the minority who did 
come were demoralized psychologically by the acceptance of 
charity. They lost their self-respect, and while their children's 
bodies were getting better their homes were getting worse. In 
order to fulfill his fundamental life purpose as a professional 
man, and also because he had received the Christian motivation 
during his student days through the Y.M.C.A. in his medical 
university, he resigned his good salary and came into the pre¬ 
carious new hospital adventure of the Cooperative Movement. 

But in a few days we found it was not so precarious. Not 
only the waiting rooms but also the halls of the little hospital 
were crowded by mothers and babies, with all sorts of patients 
waiting to see one or another of the physicians of the complete 
expert medical unit which had been installed. It was the hap¬ 
piest place in Tokyo, and many former Communists had joined 
it, being glad to relinquish their ideas of social improvement 
through violent revolution if they might be able to join even 
one unit of the new society upon a love basis. 

Before Kagawa started that cooperative hospital in Tokyo 
there had been ten small rural medical cooperatives in existence 
for some years, which had tested and proved the method in 
Japan. Then came the great depression, and 2,321 population 
areas with 5,000 people in each were deserted by the doctors 
because they could no longer make a living in them under the 
old hit-or-miss profit system. The patients simply did not pay 
fees. In many other areas preventive medicine had ceased to 
exist. The byword was: “The doctor has gone to so-and-so's 
today—there will be a funeral there next week”; the reason 
being that the people had become so poor they simply could not 
afford to call the doctor until the patient was actually dying. 

This despite the fact that there are seventeen big medical uni¬ 
versities in Japan turning out physicians trained in modern 
medicine every year. There £re plenty of good physicians even 
for the large population, but the old system of distribution had 
broken down. So Kagawa started the hospital in Tokyo, and 
because Japan is very Tokyo-minded many others sprang up 
quickly. There are now at least sixty-seven of these hospitals, 
recognized by the government as cooperatives, and a hundred 
more places in which they are in various stages of formation. 
They have reduced what the farmer has to pay for his annual 


- 30 - 


doctoring from 28 per cent to 9 per cent of his annual average 
income, and restored preventive medicine to the rural districts 
in many of the most poverty-stricken regions. 

Naturally there was some opposition from the physicians, for 
Kagawa found that the physician who treated the farmer was 
getting just twelve times as much as his patient for his annual 
average income. The farmer was getting 450 yen a year, and 
the physician was getting that same amount per month. More¬ 
over the physicians are organized into a physicians’ associa¬ 
tion with branches everywhere, and have power to fix the 
minimum fees which all physicians must charge. But Kagawa 
wrote a book to show the physicians of Japan that their future 
hope is in this new system, that they themselves need the se¬ 
curity which it will offer, and the permanent good salaries. He 
also publishes a weekly news sheet primarily for the physicians 
to keep them up-to-date with the astonishingly rapid growth of 
the new movement. Though some are laggards, many of the 
finest physicians of Japan are dedicating not merely their clinic 
time but their whole future lives and their fortunes to this 
movement. 

It is encouraging to find similar developments in America. 
In a certain city, which must not as yet be mentioned by name, 
there is a group of seven physicians at work educating their 
own patients to consumer-consciousness. They have already put 
them on a flat rate per year for payment, and when the patients 
are a little farther along in their own commitment to the ideas 
of the Cooperative Movement, these doctors are going to call a 
meeting at which the patients will proceed to organize them¬ 
selves as consumers and reemploy the physicians, on good 
salaries. This is the right way to do it. When you get into a 
hospital, you are likely to suffer, and when you get out again 
you suffer a great deal more paying the bills. The cooperative 
principle is that you as a consumer patient are the one who 
should own the hospital. Experience proves that this is the best 
form of socialized medicine. The doctors and nurses are the 
employes, at good salaries, and they are also members of the 
cooperative and equally interested in the enterprise. The psy¬ 
chological relationship among them all is vastly improved over 
the present system, and the patients get well a great deal faster. 

XII 

Just a word in closing to clarify our minds by a comparison 
between the three men and the three foreign countries that are 
now impinging upon the lives of all of us—Lenin and Rus- 


- 31 - 


sia, Gandhi and India, Kagawa and Japan. Lenin, trying to 
save his people, used dictatorship of the proletariat and vio¬ 
lence. We turn to Gandhi and we like him because in the worst 
caste-ridden country in the world he is building a reconciled 
community of all classes in one fellowship, and he is basing 
his movement on absolute non-violence and non-resistance. 

Kagawa is with him 100 per cent in these methods and goes 
ahead of him in at least three others, in all of which he is a 
cooperator. Gandhi came to the place where he declared him¬ 
self a non-cooperator with government. One can’t blame him. 
Kagawa had his own government instead of a foreign govern¬ 
ment to deal with, and so may have had the advantage, but he 
endured a great deal of persecution from his government until 
finally he won its confidence, and since the earthquake of 1923, 
although refusing to accept either political office or money from 
the government, he has been on two or more national govern¬ 
ment commissions as a volunteer worker. He tells us that gov¬ 
ernment is not good as a dictatorship, but that government can 
be made to back up and enforce and stabilize and subsidize the 
initiative of the people, once that is evoked and integrated in a 
Consumers’ Cooperative Movement. 

Again, where Gandhi would bid us turn back to the pre¬ 
machine hand-spinning stage, Kagawa is a cooperator with the 
machine age, or rather with the automatic power production age 
into which we entered at the beginning of the twentieth cen¬ 
tury. Kagawa says the machine was created by man under the 
guidance of God, and it does not need to victimize him. If we 
are honest with ourselves, we must admit that as yet we are vic¬ 
tims of the machine. Kagawa is showing us how, by consumer 
control and eventual consumer ownership, we can make the 
machine serve humanitarian purposes, and this is a technique 
we desperately need today. 

Also, where Gandhi remained a Hindu, Kagawa became a 
Christian. That means he is a cooperator with us in the same 
organization. He is moreover going away ahead of us and 
demonstrating a new and comprehensive definition of what a 
Christian is meant to be in this modem age. 

To preach the gospel and to abolish poverty was Kagawa’s 
concept of his Christian duty at nineteen. Today he calls all 
Christians to a similar program, and defines its methods as 
three-fold. Evangelism always comes first and foremost with 
him; education is a close second; social organization, in which 
the organizing of the cooperatives is the chief feature, com¬ 
pletes the trio. When people ask you if you are a Christian, 


- 32 - 


he says, do not answer glibly in the affirmative, but rather, in 
all humility, reply that you are trying to become a Christian. 
And the way to become one is to qualify along these lines. 

“As you know,” he wrote recently regarding his 1936 trip to 
the United States, “I am much interested in the organization of 
cooperative societies because I believe that only through them 
can the necessary economic foundation of world peace be laid. 
These cooperatives must be imbued with the ideals of Christian 
love and service. It follows that I am interested in speaking to 
already existing cooperative organizations as well as to church 
groups. Somehow these two groups must be brought together 
to the end that the cooperatives become Christian and the 
churches become cooperative.” 

That is a program in which each of us has a part and a re¬ 
sponsibility. 


[For further information concerning the Cooperative 
Movement write The Cooperative League of the U.S.A., 167 
West 12th Street, New York City.] 


Willett, Clark & Company 
Copyright 1935 by 


Copies of this pamphlet may be secured from Willett, Clark & Company, 
440 South Dearborn Street, Chicago, at 15 cents per copy (10 cents each in 
quantities of 10 or more). 


Manufactured in the United States of America 
by the General Printing Company, Chicago. 


- 33 - 


% V 



You have read this sketch of Kagawa’s fife 
and service to the Cooperative Movement. 
Now let Kagawa speak for himself 

in 

MEDITATIONS 
on the CROSS 

by 

KAGAWA 

(Translated by Helen F. Topping 
and Marion C. Draper.) 

A book which lays bare the true Kagawa—his passionate 
religious devotion, his belief in social solidarity, his 
search for a cooperative way of life, his program for 
world brotherhood. 

#1.50 a copy 

(All royalties from the sale of this book go to 
the support of the work of Kagawa in Japan.) 

lAfU | FW f* B ADI/ ft AA 440 S. Dearborn St., Chicago 
TTlLLrCI 1/ Ot W. 200 Fifth Avenue, New York 






























































